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What the Right Gets Wrong About Zohran Mamdani

thefp.com · 266 words · saved by 1 readers

Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a “socialist” or an “Islamist sympathizer.” But his worldview isn’t born of Marx or Mecca, writes Zineb Riboua—it’s heir to a 20th-century crusade that turned anti-imperial struggle into a moral identity.

Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a “socialist” or an “Islamist sympathizer.” The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-20th century that recasts politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony. I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan Berber, I grew…

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